In a near-desert landscape, no claim to the land is worth anything if it isn’t also a claim to the water. It’s a truism about First Nations Land Claims. It’s the same […]
Water, Water, Water
The Mystery of the Birds Deepens
On Saturday, I pointed out that the birds and bears are absent from the north end of Okanagan Lake. About a hundred miles to the south, it is a different story: Elderberries […]
Where are the Birds?
Used to be that the waxwings, crows, and robins would pretty well pick the land clean down to its bones. And now? The Birds are Gone What is a poor elderberry bush […]
Golf
Driving and a golf ball around eighteen holes is a complex kind of mathematics. It takes so much time to get around the course, measured in so and so many strokes at […]
Wild Apples
The American natural philosopher Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis in May, 1862. He lived to see the apples bloom that year and begin to swell into fruit, but not to mature […]
Royal Gala Country
Late in September, a forklift driver at a Kelowna apple packing house goes on a hunger strike for publicizing that a truckload of Washington Royal Gala apples was inside his warehouse during Royal […]
Food and Industry
Here’s an example of what can happen when a horticultural industry is replaced by a technological one: Hanford, Washington The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was created on the Columbia, in the […]
Health
Stand Off at The Dalles, Oregon Just one of the nine major dams NK’mip salmon jump on their long swim home. Two technologies draw their identity from the same river. One is […]
The Kids are Alright
I suggested that rather than being divided, culture today is unified. Since the kids are our future, let’s have a look at their rites of initiation into adulthood. First, a campground bonfire […]
The Big Picture
The big picture is vast and complex. Maybe not. Take a look. Mullein Overlooking Bella Vista and the Commonage Hint: the Mullein is not a weed here. It is a native plant […]
